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Ethical Leadership and Team-Level Creativity: Mediation of Psychological Safety Climate and Moderation of Supervisor Support for Creativity

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Abstract

This study explores how and when ethical leadership predicts three forms of team-level creativity, namely team creativity, average of member creativity, and dispersion of member creativity. The results, based on 230 members of 44 knowledge work teams from Chinese organizations, showed that ethical leadership was positively related to team creativity and average of member creativity but was negatively related to dispersion of member creativity. Consistent with the predictions of uncertainty reduction theory, psychological safety climate mediated the relationship between ethical leadership and the three forms of team-level creativity. Furthermore, supervisor support for creativity positively moderated the effect of ethical leadership on psychological safety climate and the indirect effects of ethical leadership on the three forms of team-level creativity through psychological safety climate. The analysis offers significant theoretical and practical implications on ethical leadership and creativity in organizations.

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Notes

  1. If we conduct CFA at the team level without any item parcels, the parameters that need to be estimated (48) are more than the sample size (n = 44), which clearly violates the typically expected desirable level of the sample-to-parameter ratio of 5 to 1 as suggested by Bentler and Chou (1987). Therefore, given that the variables in the present study are measured at the individual level and then aggregated at the team level, we conducted a multilevel CFA instead of a team-level CFA, with 230 employees nested in 44 teams. To reduce the parameters for estimation in the small sample CFA, we employed item parcel technique (Bagozzi and Edwards 1998; Mo et al. 2017). Considering that ethical leadership is unidimensional and contains ten items, we constructed three parcels using the single-factor method as recommended by Landis et al. (2000). Accordingly, the first parcel combined the items of the first, tenth, and second highest factor loadings. The second parcel combined the items of the third, ninth, and fourth highest factor loadings. The third parcel combined the remaining four items. The results of multilevel CFA revealed an acceptable fit for the data (χ2 = 257.378, df = 142, CFI = .931, TLI = .912, and RMSEA = .059).

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Funding

This study was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71402127) and the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2015S1A5A2A03048150).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics and Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan City, Hubei Province, People’s Republic of China

    Yidong Tu

  2. College of Business Administration, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, USA

    Xinxin Lu

  3. School of Business Administration, Seoul National University, 1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul, 151-916, Republic of Korea

    Jin Nam Choi

  4. Beijing Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau, Building 3, Lotus District, Haidian District, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Wei Guo

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  1. Yidong Tu
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Correspondence to Jin Nam Choi.

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Tu, Y., Lu, X., Choi, J.N. et al. Ethical Leadership and Team-Level Creativity: Mediation of Psychological Safety Climate and Moderation of Supervisor Support for Creativity. J Bus Ethics 159, 551–565 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-018-3839-9

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